Tony Stewart sees NASCAR in a more well-rounded view since giving up the steering wheel.

Now fully transitioned to car owner, Stewart is well aware of what's going on with all four of his cars. It's quite a change from his driving days when Stewart was zoned in on his team and only had a small idea of what the others were doing.

With the change, also came new responsibilities for Stewart. On race weekends, you can find Stewart atop the pit box of Clint Bowyer and the No. 14 team. Up there, Stewart has continually gotten more involved while listening to team scanners.

"At first there really wasn't much for me to do other than sit and watch and listen. Now they give me a laptop, and I have timing and scoring," Stewart told RACER. "But I also help the engineers look at the (Ford) photos, in particular at the beginning of the race, to see what the splitter looks like.

"If there's any contact, you're looking at the pictures to try to find what it is, how bad it is, do we bother with it. Get a game plan of, yeah, we have to fix this, this is what it is, this is what it looks like before (the car) ever gets to the pit box. ... It's just a totally different perspective from being inside the car."

And one Stewart enjoys, especially when it comes to the strategy aspect of racing. Although, still with the mindset of a driver, Stewart admits 50 percent of the time the call he would make is different from the crew chief.

When asked how he's able to apply what he now sees from outside the car to make his organization better, Stewart cracks that he lets the people smarter than him handle that.

"It's more me understanding the trends we're having problems with and saying, 'What are we doing to shift the balance of this trend?'" Stewart said. "It's not like I'm sitting there leading the charge of let's do this, let's do that.

"But it helps to understand what's going on and what the trend is, what guys are fighting. If we have one car that's off more than the others, OK, what are they doing different than the other three are? Why would be having this kind of problem? It's just trying to find the little things to tie it all together."

Midway through the season, Stewart-Haas Racing finds itself in a decent spot. Between its four cars, the organization has led over 500 laps with two wins from Kurt Busch and Kevin Harvick. Those two drivers are locked into the playoffs, and Bowyer is battling for a spot based on points.

Breaking down his four drivers, Stewart begins with Harvick:

"Not been as dominant as we've seen the last couple years, but he's led a lot of laps and been a top five car just about every week, everywhere we go. We're in the hunt every week with that car."

On Kurt Busch:

"It's the ability to kind of try stuff and figure out what's working, what's not working for him."

On Danica Patrick:

"The last couple weeks she's shown improvements, too."

And the new guy, Bowyer:

"Clint's been on the verge of winning a race. He's been on the cusp of it.

"You look at other four-car organizations, they're having worse problems than we are trying to get all four cars tied together," Stewart said. "So, I feel like all in all, it's not been necessarily a total disaster, but you're always trying to find ways to make it better, and that's the goal every week."

With Harvick, Busch, and Patrick in the SHR system long enough to understand how and why things are done in a certain way, Stewart has liked what he's seen with the addition of Bowyer. All four drivers mesh well and their personalities make it easy for them to work together and communicate.

As for what Bowyer (pictured above) has brought the company, Stewart revealed he sees something familiar.

"What I like is I feel the passion in him that I had and when it's going good he's happy; when it's a little bit off he's frustrated," Stewart said, "and I'm sitting here like, 'You're not in a bad spot right here,' and he'll be frustrated. But I like hearing that. That's what I want to hear out of my drivers. I want them to be frustrated when we're not exactly where we want to be.

"We hired him because he's a talented driver and we know he can go out and run well, and he hasn't won a race yet, but he's run well. Consistent right out of the box. I think that's something that makes our whole organization stronger. We've got three or four teams that can run up front together, and that's what you want. Once you get them all in the same basket, get them in the same group, then you can do things to go forward."

Competing under the Ford banner for the first time this season, SHR hasn't missed a beat in competitiveness. When it comes to the speed of the Ford package, which some other Ford teams have complained about in recent months, Stewart pointed at SHR's focus still on learning the balance of the cars.

"The hard part is there was an aero change over the winter, too. So, it would have been the same adjustment anyway and that same learning curve regardless," Stewart said of joining the Ford family.

"I guess to a certain degree if you were going to have a change in manufacturers like we did, that was the time to do it because it was a new learning curve anyway with a new aero package. Perfect timing to have to switch manufacturers anyway, to learn it."

In other words, whether it's his new role, line-up of drivers, playoff outlook, or a manufacturer switch, Tony Stewart likes what he sees.